The adventures of Maurice Strong & Co.
illustrate the fact that nowadays
you don't have to be a household name to wield global power.

RONALD BAILEY

Mr. Bailey is a freelance journalist and
television producer in Washington, D.C.
He is the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of
Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martin's)
and The True State of the Planet (Free Press).

WASHINGTON, D.C.

'THE survival
of civilization in something like its present form might
depend significantly on the efforts of a single man,"
declared The New Yorker. The New York Times
hailed that man as the "Custodian of the Planet."
He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for
Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence?
Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you
should have. Militia members are famously worried that black
helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN
troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril
is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international
bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of
"global governance" that is slowly gaining control
over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old
Canadian, is the "indispensable man" at the center
of this creeping UN power grab.

Not that Mr. Strong looks particularly indispensable.
Indeed, he exudes a kind of negative charisma. He is a grey,
short, soft-voiced man with a salt-and-pepper toothbrush
mustache who wouldn't rate a second glance if you passed him
on the street. Yet his remarkable career has led him from
boyhood poverty in Manitoba to the highest councils of
international government.

Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank
President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth
Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute;
Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum;
member of Toyota's International Advisory Board. As advisor
to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.

Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as
Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment
and Development -- the so-called Earth Summit -- held in Rio
de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic
and environmental regulation.

"He's dangerous because he's a much smarter and
shrewder man [than many in the UN system]," comments
Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under
President Reagan. "I think he is a very dangerous
ideologue, way over to the Left."

"This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,"
says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and
foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. "If he is
whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all."

Strong attracts such mystified suspicion because he is
difficult to pin down. He told Maclean's in 1976 that
he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in
methodology." And his career combines oil deals with the
likes of Adnan Khashoggi with links to the environmentalist
Left. He is in fact one of a new political breed: the
bi-sectoral entrepreneur who uses business success for
leverage in politics, and vice versa.

Strong started in the oil business in the 1950s. He took
over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in
the 1960s, and he was president of a major holding company --
the Power Corporation of Canada -- by the age of 35. This was
success by any standard. Yet on more than one occasion
(including once in Who's Who), Strong has been caught
exaggerating. He claimed, for instance, to have forfeited a
$200,000 salary when he left Power. The real figure, said a
company officer, was $35,000. Why this myth-making? Well, a
CEO is just a CEO -- but a whiz-kid is a potential cabinet
officer.

And it is in politics that Strong's talents really shine.
He is the Michelangelo of networking. He early made friends
in high places in Canada's Liberal Party -- including Paul
Martin Sr., Canada's external-affairs minister in the Sixties
-- and kept them as business partners in oil and real-estate
ventures. He cultivated bright well-connected young people --
like Paul Martin Jr., Canada's present finance minister and
the smart money's bet to succeed Jean Chretien as prime
minister -- and salted them throughout his various political
and business networks to form a virtual private intelligence
service. And he always seemed to know what the next political
trend would be -- foreign aid, Canadian economic nationalism,
environmentalism.

In 1966, by now a Liberal favorite, Strong became head of
the Canadian International Development Agency and thus was
launched internationally. Impressed by his work at CIDA, UN
Secretary General U Thant asked him to organize what became
the first Earth Summit -- the Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became first
director of the new UN Environment Program, created as a
result of Stockholm. And in 1975, he was invited back to
Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, created by
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC's oil
shocks.

Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada's anti-American Left,
then denouncing American ownership of the country's oil
companies. Strong talked a good economic-nationalist game --
but he himself was a major reason why Canada's oil companies
were U.S.-owned. Ten years before, while at Power
Corporation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only
remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling
block of shares in its direction. As Maclean's wrote,
he now returned "amid fanfares" to rectify this.

After a couple of years, Strong left Petro-Canada for
various business deals, including one with Adnan Khashoggi
through which he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca ranch
in Colorado, now a "New Age" center run by his
wife, Hanne. (Among the seekers at Baca are Zen and Tibetan
Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns, and
followers of a Hindu guru called Babaji.) Not for long the
joys of contemplation, however. In 1985, he was back as
executive coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency
Operations in Africa, in charge of running the $3.5-billion
famine-relief effort in Somalia and Ethiopia. And in 1989, he
was appointed Secretary General of the Earth Summit --
shortly thereafter flying down to Rio.

Strong's flexibility, however, must not be mistaken for
open-mindedness. His friends, his allies among Canadian
Liberals, his networks in the UN and the Third World, even
his long-term business partners (like the late Paul
Nathanson, wartime treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet
Friendship Committee) all lean Left. He has said the
Depression left him "frankly very radical." And
given his ability to get things done, the consistency of his
support for a world managed by bureaucrats is alarming. As
Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto's Saturday Night
magazine:

It is instructive to read Strong's 1972 Stockholm speech
and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong
warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of
forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the
population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the
conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental
organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited
to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues
became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the
U.S., Britain, and Europe.

IN the
meantime, Strong continued the international networking on
which his influence rests. He became a member of the World
Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland
Commission). He found time to serve as president of the World
Federation of United Nations Associations, on the executive
committee of the Society for International Development, and
as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World
Wildlife Fund. Above all, he served on the Commission on
Global Governance -- which, as we shall see, plays a crucial
part in the international power grab.

Sometimes, indeed, it seems that Strong's network of
contacts must rival the Internet. To list a few:

-- Vice President Al Gore. (Of course.)

-- World Bank President James Wolfensohn, formerly on the
Rockefeller Foundation Board and currently on the Population
Council Board; he was Al Gore's favored candidate for the
World Bank position.

-- James Gustave Speth, head of the Carter
Administration's Council on Environmental Quality, crafter of
the doomladen Global 2000 report, member of the Clinton -
Gore transition team; he now heads the UN Development
Program.

-- Shridath Ramphal, formerly Secretary General of the
(British) Commonwealth, now Co-Chairman of the Commission on
Global Governance.

-- Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources
Institute -- which works closely with the World Bank, the UN
Environment Program, and the UN Development Program -- and
Co-Chairman of the President's Council on Sustainable
Development.

-- Ingvar Carlsson, former Swedish prime minister and
Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.

But Strong is no snob; he even counts Republican
Presidents among his friends. Elaine Dewar again:

Strong blurted out that he'd almost been shut out of the
Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been
overruled by the White House because George Bush knew him. He
said that he'd donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a
slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The
Republicans didn't confirm.)

I had been absolutely astonished. I mean yes, he had done
a great deal of business in the U.S., but how could he have
managed such contributions?

Well, he'd had a green card. The governor of Colorado had
suggested it to him. A lawyer in Denver had told him how.

But why? I'd asked.

"Because I wanted influence in the United
States."

So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious
legality) to both parties; George Bush, now a friend,
intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference;
he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda there; and
Bush took a political hit in an election year. An instructive
tale -- if it is not part of Strong's mythmaking.

Most of Strong's friends are more obviously compatible,
which may explain why they tend to overlap in their
institutional commitments. For example, James Wolfensohn
(whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early Sixties to
run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies)
appointed him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon
being named chairman of the World Bank. "I'd been
involved in . . . Stockholm, which Maurice Strong
arranged," says Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been
credited with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth
Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in
Brazil earlier this year. As head of the Earth Council,
Maurice Strong chaired that meeting.

It's not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of
like-minded people fighting to save the world from less
prescient and more selfish forces -- namely, market forces.
And though the crises change -- World War II in the Forties,
fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the "energy
crisis" in the Seventies -- the Left's remedy is always
the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an
allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind
their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Strong has
warned memorably: "If we don't change, our species will
not survive. . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the
only way of saving the world will be for industrial
civilization to collapse." Apocalypse soon -- unless
international bodies save us from ourselves.

LAST week,
Secretary General Annan unveiled Maurice Strong's plan for
reorganizing the UN. To be sure, the notoriously corrupt and
inefficient UN bureaucracy could do with some shaking up.
Strong's plan, however, mostly points in a different
direction -- one drawn from a document, Our Global
Neighborhood, devised by the interestingly named
Commission on Global Governance.

The CGG was established in 1992, after Rio, at the
suggestion of Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and
head of the Socialist International. Then Secretary General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed it. The CGG naturally denies
advocating the sort of thing that fuels militia nightmares.
"We are not proposing movement toward a world
government," reassuringly write Co-Chairmen Ingvar
Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, ". . . [but] this is not
to say that the goal should be a world without systems or
rules." Quite so. As Hofstra University law professor
Peter Spiro describes it: "The aim is not a superstate
but rather the establishment of norm-creating multilateral
regimes . . . This construct already constrains state action
in the context of human rights and environmental protection
and is on a springboard in other areas."

The concept of global governance has been fermenting for
some time. In 1991, the Club of Rome (of which Strong is, of
course, a member) issued a report called The First Global
Revolution, which asserted that current problems
"are essentially global and cannot be solved through
individual country initiatives [which] gives a greatly
enhanced importance to the United Nations and other
international systems." Also in 1991 Strong claimed that
the Earth Summit, of which he was Secretary General, would
play an important role in "reforming and strengthening
the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system
of democratic global governance." In 1995, in Our
Global Neighborhood, the CGG agreed: "It is our firm
conclusion that the United Nations must continue to play a
central role in global governance."

Americans should be worried
by the Commission's recommendations: for instance, that some UN activities be funded through taxes on foreign-exchange transactions and
multinational corporations. Economist James Tobin estimates
that a 0.5 per cent tax on foreign-exchange transactions
would raise $1.5 trillion annually -- nearly equivalent to
the U.S. federal budget.

It also recommended that
"user fees" might be imposed on companies operating
in the "global commons." Such fees might be
collected on international airline tickets, ocean shipping,
deep-sea fishing, activities in Antarctica, geostationary
satellite orbits, and electromagnetic spectrum. But the big
enchilada is carbon taxes, which would be levied on all fuels
made from coal, oil, and natural gas. "A carbon
tax," the report deadpans, ". . . would yield very
large revenues indeed." Given the UN's record of
empire-building and corruption, Cato's Ted Carpenter warns:
"One can only imagine the degree of mischief it could
get into if it had independent sources of revenue."

Especially significant for the U.S. was the CGG's proposal
for eventual elimination of the veto held by the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Commission
knew that the current permanent members of the Security
Council, including the U.S., would not easily surrender their
vetoes, and so it recommended a two-stage process.

In the first stage, five new permanent members (without a
veto) would be added to the Security Council -- probably
Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, and Nigeria -- along with
three new slots for non-permanent members. But the real
threat to U.S. interests is the second stage: "a full
review of the membership of the Council . . . around 2005,
when the veto can be phased out." These plans are
advancing. In March, the president of the UN General
Assembly, Razali Ismail of Malayasia, unveiled his own
formula for reforming the Security Council. It closely tracks
the CGG's proposals. In particular, Razali proposed
"urg[ing] the original permanent members to limit use of
the veto . . . and not to extend [it] to new permanent
members." He wanted to make the veto "progressively
and politically untenable" and recommended that these
arrangements be reviewed in ten years.

In July the State Department compromised -- accepting five
new Security Council members but remaining silent on the
veto. It plainly hopes that the veto issue will go away if
the U.S. concedes on enlarging the Council. Yet the CGG's
report makes clear that we are facing a rolling agenda to
expand the power of UN bureaucrats. The veto issue may be
postponed for ten years -- but what then?

"This is an initiative that should be resisted by the
United States with special vehemence," says Ted
Carpenter. For if the veto were eliminated, the United States
would face the prospect of having other countries make key
determinations that affect us without our consent.

THE Commission
also wants to strengthen "global civil society,"
which, it explains, "is best expressed in the global
non-governmental movement." Today, there are nearly
15,000 NGOs. More than 1,200 of them have consultative status
with the UN's Economic and Social Council (up from 41 in
1948). The CGG wants NGOs to be brought formally into the UN
system (no wonder Kenneth Minogue calls this Acronymia). So
it proposes that representatives of such organizations be
accredited to the General Assembly as "Civil Society
Organizations" and convened in an annual Forum of Civil
Society.

But how would these representatives be selected? This
June, the General Assembly held a session on environmental
issues called Earth Summit +5. President Razali selected a
number of representatives from the NGOs and the private
sector for the exclusive privilege of speaking in the plenary
sessions. "I have gone to a lot of trouble with this,
choosing the right NGOs," he declared. So whom did he
choose?

Among others: Thilo Bode, executive director of
Greenpeace, to represent the scientific and technological
community; Yolanda Kakabadse, the president of the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and
"from the farmers, I have chosen an organic farmer,
Denise O'Brien from the United States, who is a member of the
Via Campesina." In what sense are these people
"representative"? Whom do they represent? Were the
head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of
Toshiba, and the president of the Farm Bureau all too busy to
come talk to the General Assembly?

Another example of how this selection process operates was
the "great civil society forum" convened at the
behest of Strong's Earth Council and Mikhail Gorbachev's
Green Cross International this past March. Some five hundred
delegates met, supposedly to assess the results of the Earth
Summit, but in reality to condemn the "inaction" of
signatory countries in implementing the Rio treaties. The
delegates were selected through a process based on national
councils for sustainable development, themselves set up
pursuant to the Earth Summit. Membership in these councils
means that an organization is already persuaded of the global
environmental crisis. So you can bet that the process did not
yield many delegates representing business or advocating
limits on government power.

This kind of international gabfest is, of course, a
sinister parody of democracy. "Very few of even the
larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in
the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on
particular issues," notes Peter Spiro. "Arguably it
is more often money than membership that determines
influence, and money more often represents the support of
centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the
grass roots." (The CGG has benefited substantially from
the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford
Foundations.)

Hilary French, Vice President of the alarmist Worldwatch
Institute, justifies this revealingly as "a paradox of
our time . . . that effective governance requires control
being simultaneously passed down to local communities and up
to international institutions." Paradoxically or not,
the voters hardly appear in this model of governance. It
bypasses national governments and representative democracy in
order to empower the sort of people who are willing to sit in
committee meetings to the bitter end. Those who have better
things to do -- businessmen, workers, moms -- would be the
losers in the type of centralized decentralization envisioned
by Worldwatch. The result would be decisions reached by
self-selecting elites. In domestic politics, we have a name
for such elite groups -- special interests.

ANOTHER CGG
recommendation is that the old UN Trusteeship Council
"be given a new mandate over the global commons."
It defines the global commons to include the atmosphere,
outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the
related environmental systems that contribute to the support
of human life. A new Trusteeship Council would oversee
"the management of the commons, including development
and use of their resources . . . [and] the administration of
environmental treaties in such fields as climate change,
biodiversity, outer space, and the Law of the Sea."

It is hard to see what this expansive definition would exclude
from the jurisdiction of the Trusteeship Council. Biodiversity encompasses all the
plants and animals on the earth, including those that live in
your backyard. Will UN troops swoop in to
stop you from cutting down trees on your property? Doubtless
not. But a recent case near Yellowstone National Park may be
a foretaste of how international agencies can meddle in U.S.
domestic affairs.

Yellowstone has been designated a "World Heritage
Site." These Sites are natural settings or cultural
monuments recognized by the World Heritage Committee of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) as having "outstanding universal
value." Sites are designated under a Convention ratified
by the U.S. Senate in 1973, and it is possible to place such
sites on a "List of World Heritage Sites in
Danger."

In this case, a mining company wanted to construct a gold
mine outside the boundaries of Yellowstone. The normal
environmental review of the project's impact was still
proceeding under U.S. law. But a group of environmentalist
NGOs opposed to the mine were not content to wait for that
review to take its course. They asked that members of the
World Heritage Committee come to Yellowstone to hold public
hearings. George Frampton, the Clinton Administration's
Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and
Parks, wrote to the WHC saying: "The Secretary [Bruce
Babbitt] and the National Park Service have clearly expressed
strong reservations with the New World Mine proposal."
Frampton added: "We believe that a potential danger to
the values of the Park and surrounding waters and fisheries
exists and that the committee should be informed that the
property as inscribed on the . . . List is in danger."
Four officials of the WHC duly came to Yellowstone and held
hearings. And at its December 1995 meeting in Berlin, the
Committee obligingly voted to list Yellowstone as a
"World Heritage Site in Danger."

"It was, in my opinion, a blatantly political
act," declared Rep. Barbara Cubin (R., Wyo.) during
congressional hearings about the listing. "It was done
to draw attention, public reaction, public response, and
public pressure to see that the mine wasn't developed."
Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell political scientist, agrees that the
international listing of such sites "provides an
international forum through which to put pressure on U.S.
policy."

Would the mine really have endangered Yellowstone? We'll
never know. The environmental-impact statement was never
issued, and, under pressure, the mining company accepted a
$65-million federal buyout plus a trade for unspecified
federal lands somewhere else. Thus, even with no enforcement
power, this UN dependency was able to make land-use policy
for the United States.

These events prompted Rep. Don Young (R., Alaska) to
introduce the American Land Sovereignty Act. With 174
co-sponsors to date, the Act aims to "preserve
sovereignty of the United States over public lands and . . .
to preserve State sovereignty and private property rights in
non-federal lands surrounding those public lands."
Congress would have to approve on a case-by-case basis land
designations made pursuant to any international agreements.

But is U.S. sovereignty really in danger? In an interview,
Strong dismissed Young's anxieties. "I do not share his
concern. It is no abdication of sovereignty to exercise it in
company with others, and when you're dealing with global
issues that's what you have to do." He continues:
"If you put yourself in a larger unit, of course, you
get some advantages and you give up some of your freedom. And
that's what's happening in Europe, that the states of Europe
have decided that overall they're better off to create a
structure in which they give up some of their national rights
and exercise them collectively through the Union."

This example of the European Union, however, worries
Ambassador Lichenstein. The EU's bureaucracy in Brussels, he
complains, "is responsible to no one. Governments get
together -- foreign ministers, finance ministers -- they
presumably hand down the guidelines, but don't kid yourself,
the bureaucrats are running things."

The Yellowstone case is an example of how
"feel-good" symbolism about the environment can be
transformed into real constraints upon real people imposed
outside the law, with no democratic oversight and no means of
redress. Ironically, Strong himself had a run-in with
Colorado environmentalists over local water rights. They did
not have the wit to call in an international agency against
the New Age rancher -- or maybe they realized that Strong was
one property owner whose rights the UN would respect.

AS troubling
as the Yellowstone incident is, much greater potential for
mischief lies in a new series of "framework
treaties" designed to handle global environmental
issues. Initially, the treaties called for voluntary actions
by governments and set up a consultative process. But
environmental activists like Hilary French know very well how
this process works. "Even though it can look
disappointing, the political will created [by these framework
conventions] can lead to commitments of a more binding
nature," she said. This is already happening.

"Although its declaration of principles was
transparently aspirational, the 1972 Stockholm world
conference on the human environment is generally recognized
as a turning point in international environmental-protection
efforts," wrote Peter Spiro. "From it emerged a
standing institution (the UN Environment Program); weak but
more focused 'framework' treaties followed, which in turn are
being filled out by specific regulatory regimes. The 1985
Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer itself
included no obligations, but
the 1987 Montreal protocols and subsequent amendments set a
full phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other
ozone-depleting substances by 1996. The
regime covers 132 signatories with a total population of 4.7
billion people. Between 1987 and 1991, global CFC consumption
was in fact reduced by half. A similar filling-out process is
likely to occur with the biodiversity and climate-change
conventions signed at Rio."

The "conventions" that Spiro was talking about
emerged from the Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong. They
deal with two of the alleged global environmental crises --
global warming and species extinction.

At the time of the Earth Summit, some scientists predicted
on the basis of climate computer models that the earth's
average temperature would increase by 4 to 9 degrees
Fahrenheit over the next century because of the
"greenhouse effect." These predictions are
controversial among scientists. And as the computer models
are refined, they show that the atmosphere will warm far less
than originally predicted. Furthermore, more accurate satellite measurements show
no increase in the average global temperature over the last
two decades. Finally, an important study
published in Nature concluded that even if the warming
predictions are right, it could well be less costly to allow
greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise for a decade or
more because technological innovations and judicious capital
investment will make it possible to reduce them far more
cheaply at some point before they become a significant
problem. In other words, we needn't take drastic and costly
action now.

The process forges ahead anyway. The Framework Convention
on Global Climate Change signed by President George Bush at
the Rio Earth Summit is already beginning to harden.
Initially, countries were supposed voluntarily to reduce by
the year 2000 the "greenhouse gases" to the level
emitted in 1990. Then, a year ago, at a UN climate-change
meeting in Geneva, the Clinton Administration offered to set legally
binding limits on the greenhouse gases the United States
can emit. In June of this year, at the UN's Earth Summit +5
session, President Clinton reaffirmed this commitment. And
mandatory limits on carbon emissions are to be finalized at a
global meeting of Convention signatories in Kyoto this
December.

Estimates of the costs to
the United States of cutting emissions range from $90 billion to $400
billion annually in lost Gross Domestic Product and a loss of
between 600,000 and 3.5 million jobs. Global costs would be
proportionately higher.

Yet while the U.S. may be committing itself to limits, 130
developing nations, including China and India, are excluded
under the Framework Convention from having to reduce their
emissions, which, on present trends, will outstrip those of
the industrialized world early in the next century. If the
U.S. and other industrial countries have to limit energy use
while the Third World is exempt, many industries will simply
decamp to where energy prices are significantly lower.

If they are permitted to do so. For, as Sen. Chuck Hagel
(R., Neb.) asked at a conference on "The Costs of
Kyoto" held by the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
"Who will administer a global climate treaty? . . . Will
we have an international agency capable of inspecting,
fining, and possibly shutting down American companies?"
Sen. Hagel is not alone is his concern. In July the U.S.
Senate passed 95 to 0 a resolution urging the Clinton
Administration not to make binding concessions at the Kyoto
conference.

But the climate-change treaty is not the only threat to
U.S. interests. Though Mr. Bush refused to sign the
Bio-diversity Convention at the Rio Earth Summit -- chaired,
remember, by GOP contributor Strong -- that only delayed
things. The Clinton Administration signed shortly after its
inauguration. Since the treaty obliges signatories to protect
plant and animal species through habitat preservation, its
implementation could make the World Heritage Committee's
activities on U.S. land use seem penny-ante by comparison.

MEANWHILE, how
much further down the path sketched out by the CGG will the
UN reforms developed by Maurice Strong and announced by Kofi
Annan last week take us?

The most important initiative is the recommendation that
the General Assembly organize a "Millennium
Assembly" and a companion "People's Assembly"
in the year 2000. (The "People's Assembly" mirrors
the CGG's "Civil Society Forum" idea -- among other
things, only accredited NGOs would be invited to advise the
General Assembly.) But what would these grand new bodies
actually do? The Millennium Assembly would invite "heads
of Government . . . to articulate their vision of prospects
and challenges for the new millennium and agree on a
process for fundamental review of the role of the United
Nations [emphasis added]." That last innocuous
phrase is diplomatese for opening up the UN Charter for
amendment. If that happens, so could anything -- notably
eliminating the veto in the Security Council.

The Millennium Assembly would also consider adopting
Strong's Earth Charter. For the most part the Charter reads
like another feel-good document -- its draft says that
"we must reinvent industrial-technological
civilization" and promises everybody a clean
environment, equitable incomes, and an end to cruelty to
animals -- but we have seen how such vacuous symbolism can
have real consequences down the line. Inevitably, the Charter
advocates that "the nations of the world should adopt as
a first step an international convention that provides an
integrated legal framework for existing and future
environmental and sustainable-development law and
policy." This is, of course, a charter for endless
intervention in the internal affairs of independent states.

Which leaves external affairs. Hey presto! In line
with the CGG's plan, Annan/Strong urge that the UN
Trusteeship Council "be reconstituted as the forum
through which member states exercise their collective
trusteeship for the integrity of the global environment and
common areas such as the oceans, atmosphere, and outer
space."

For the time being, however,
Annan and Strong have avoided calling for global taxes or user fees to finance
the UN.
One spokesman said that the issue was simply "too hot to
handle right now." What they propose is a Revolving
Credit Fund of $1 billion so that the UN will have a source
of operating funds even if a major contributor (e.g., the
U.S.) withholds contributions for a time. In short, the CGG's
blueprint for a more powerful UN closely resembles the
movement to expand the requirements of the Framework
Convention on Global Climate Change. While the process may be
piecemeal, the goal is clear: a more powerful set of
international institutions, increasingly emancipated from the
control of the major powers, increasingly accountable not to
representative democratic institutions but to unelected
bureaucracies, and increasingly exercising authority over how
people, companies, and governments run their affairs -- not
just Americans, but everyone. In short, Col. Qaddafi's
definition of his leftist Green Revolution: "Committees
Everywhere."

If so, the future looks good for Maurice Strong. One UN
source suggested that, at the very least, he would like to be
made Secretary General of the Millennium Assembly or the
People's Assembly. Others suspect that, even at age 68,
Strong is angling to be the next UN Secretary General.

Such eminence may help explain a puzzling incident in his
early career. Having long had political ambitions, he decided
to enter the Canadian Parliament. A candidate was evicted
from a safe constituency by the Liberal leadership, and
Strong moved in. Then, with only a month to go before the
1979 election, he suddenly pulled out of the race. Strong's
business deals were especially complicated at the time -- he
was setting up a Swiss oil-and-gas exploration company with
partners that included the Kuwaiti Finance Minister and the
Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation -- and that is the
explanation usually given. But maybe he just decided that for
a man who wants power, elections are an unnecessary obstacle.